Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
...I search hard to find the obvious meaning. (Photo: powerless to say what is obvious. The birth of literature.)
Errol Morris
[Documentary filmmaker, b. 1948, Hewlett, New York, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
Photography presents things and at the same time hides things from our view, and the coupling of photography and language provides an express train to error.
John Baldessari
[Artist, b. 1931, National City, California, lives in Venice, California.]
One of the things that compels me is I can’t prioritize a word over an image. It’s that constant state of not being able to pick or to say that this is more important than that. They’re both important.
Ralph Steiner
[Photographer, b. 1899, Cleveland, Ohio, d. 1986, Hanover, New Hampshire.]
“The camera cannot lie” is true only in the sense that it is a little harder to tell a complete falsehood with a camera than with words.
Victor Burgin
[Artist and writer, b. 1941, Sheffield, England, lives in London.]
Even the uncaptioned “art” photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.
Wim Wenders
[Artist and filmmaker, b. 1945, Düsseldorf, lives in Berlin.]
Whoever came up first with that saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” didn’t understand the first thing about either one.
Vilém Flusser
[Writer and philosopher, b. 1920, Prague, Czechoslovakia, d. 1991, Prague.]
He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera.... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.
William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
